28 Hearts of Sand (11 page)

Tim’s motives always seemed to get a pass, and nobody questioned the saintliness of what he was doing even though so much of it was damaging and hurtful. If it was left up to Timothy Brand, no woman would ever again be able to get a safe and legal abortion, no gay couples would ever again be allowed to marry or adopt children, and—she wasn’t sure what the “and” was.

Susan had started to busy herself taking files out of filing cabinets, probably in order to take them off and copy them.

“You know,” Susan said. “You’re not going to be able to get out from under this forever. You have to go back to Connecticut to campaign, and you have to go back to Connecticut to talk to Jason Battlesea. He isn’t going to let you get away with nothing more of a statement than the one you made on the night they found Chapin Waring’s body.”

2

For about an hour that morning, Hope Matlock felt better. In fact, she felt positively happy. Summers these days were always bad news, because there was never any teaching to be had in the summers. Summer courses went to full-time people who wanted to make a little extra money on the side.

She thought she would read e-mail and look around a little before she performed her ordinary summer-morning ritual of checking the bank account and counting the money. There was not a lot of money to count, but she thought she might be able to get through July without any actual problem. That was what was stopping her from doing anything drastic.

She made coffee from one of those coffee pods. She had another six in the box, and after that she would have to get the freeze-dried stuff. She logged on to her computer and then on to the Internet. She thought she was probably one of the last five people on earth who still had dial-up. The computer made those weird connecting-to-the-Internet noises that AOL seemed to think would make users less frustrated and angry with how long it took. Then the Welcome Screen came up and the little voice said, “You’ve got mail!”

Hope opened her e-mail to find just what she was expecting, plus one from Caitlin Hall. Caitlin Hall was, nominally, her boss. Letters from Caitlin at odd times of the year were never good news. Hope had her contracts for the fall. This probably meant that she was going to lose one of them.

Hope took another long sip of coffee and waited. She still had the material she’d collected a few days ago. It was lying on the dining room table. She could go in and get it and start doing something about it today. It might be dangerous, what with this Gregor Demarkian arriving today—but what did she mean by dangerous? Half the people she thought of as her friends barely spoke to her these days.

She moved her mouse and clicked on Caitlin’s e-mail. She waited while it took forever to open. If she called AOL to complain about how slow her service was, they would tell her she should move off dial-up and sign on to broadband, or whatever it was these days.

The e-mail form came up blank. Then it sort of shivered. Then there was a message, although not much of one.

I’ve got an ADP, Thursday nights 6 to 9, eight weeks, English 101, starting next week.

2100.

Can you do this?

Hope stared down at the e-mail.

It was, in a way, a kind of miracle. Part-timers never got summer courses. And never meant never. Hope had been teaching at the same place for close to fifteen years. She’d had exactly one summer course in all that time. ADP meant “accelerated degree program.” The courses lasted only eight weeks, and there was a lot on the Internet. Hope loved working on the Internet.

She clicked on the Reply button and said:

Of course! Yes! I’d love to!

Twenty-one hundred dollars might not sound like a lot of money, but it was twenty-one hundred more than Hope usually had in the summer. She could stop worrying about paying her gas and electric bills. She could start thinking seriously about doing a massive Costco shop.

She thought about the papers out on the dining room table, and mentally imagined them dissolving into air. There were people she needed. Tim Brand was one of them. She could just imagine what Tim would say about all that.

She got up and went out into the kitchen to see if there was anything going on. Sometimes she fell into a stress-induced sleep before she’d remembered to put away the mayonnaise or clean up the stove after dinner.

She looked into the refrigerator and didn’t like anything she saw. She looked into the freezer and found a large bag of Pizza Rolls. She took this out and arranged twenty of them on a plate. She shoved the plate into the microwave and set it for two minutes and fifteen seconds. Then she went back to the refrigerator and got a large, three-liter bottle of IGA cola.

The microwave beeped. Hope took the plate of Pizza Rolls and the bottle of cola and went through the dining room into the living room. She sat down on the couch and put the plate and the bottle on the coffee table. The coffee table was covered with books and magazines and take-out menus from half a dozen restaurants. The menus came in the snail mail, and Hope kept them all just in case something came along that meant that she could use them.

She was feeling a little dizzy again. She needed to take the medication Tim had given her. She preferred to get her medication from Tim rather than the emergency room, because Tim never looked at her funny or asked her to make a plan to pay.

She finished off the Pizza Rolls and thought about making another plate. She decided against it and went upstairs to shower. The stairs were hard. She was hyperventilating by the time she got to the top of them, and she was dizzy again.

She showered, and washed her hair, and gave some thought to the world out there, if only in Alwych. This was the day Gregor Demarkian was supposed to show up. She didn’t believe the man would be able to make any more sense out of the life of Chapin Waring than anybody else had. It was silly to think of Chapin as a force of nature. She had only seemed like that to Hope when Hope was very young, and it was part of being very young that you overestimated the lightweights with charisma.

She went down the hall to her proper bedroom, the same bedroom she had had when she was growing up. She went into her big wardrobe and found some summer clothes. One of the wonderful things about being up here on the second floor was that she had access to all her things.

She found a skirt and a T-shirt she particularly liked, and some almost-new underwear. She got dressed and then she looked through the wardrobe again. She got T-shirts and skirts and big, stretchy dresses.

She went back downstairs again, carrying the big pile of clothes, humming a little. She put the clothes on the dining room table, on top of the papers she had spread out there.

She was just about coming to the decision that she needed that extra plate of Pizza Rolls when she heard the sharp click from the computer that meant that she had new mail. She went in to see if it was something important.

She found a new e-mail from Caitlin Hall. That would be Caitlin confirming she’d gotten Hope’s message, and probably promising an attachment with a syllabus template as soon as possible.

Hope opened the e-mail. She stared at it for a minute.

Oh, Hope,
it said.
I’m so sorry. I sent that last night, and I was under a lot of pressure to fill that immediately if not sooner. I’ll let you know if anything else shows up.

The dizzy thing was back again, right there at the top of her head. Her entire skull felt numb.

It would be crazy to think Caitlin had done this on purpose, but that was what Hope did think. There was just something about this that felt deliberate, like the bait and switch children used to make fun of other children. Lucy taking the ball away before Charlie Brown could kick it. Kids at a junior high school dance pulling a chair out from under someone trying to sit down near the wall.

Hope closed the e-mail. She got up and walked away from the computer. She walked into the dining room. The clothes were still there, spread out across the papers.

She leaned forward and picked up some of the clothes. She moved them carefully to another part of the table. She looked at the papers underneath them and made a face.

She had to ask herself, when she found herself in these situations, if the people who believed in karma had it right. Maybe she had been something terrible in her last life, something that deserved everything she was getting now.

Maybe she had been Caitlin Hall in her last life, and the gods that controlled that sort of thing would never let her forget it.

EIGHT

1

The Alwych Police Department was the model of modern suburban law enforcement—suburban in the old sense of the word, when suburbs were places rich people went so they didn’t have to live next to all those other people in the city. The building was small but very, very clean. All the surfaces gleamed as if they had never been used. There was a big open area at the front, with a counter staffed by a woman in a crisply immaculate uniform and, beyond her, a sea of uncluttered desks. There was a corridor that looked completely blank going off toward the back. There wasn’t anything that looked like it could be a jail, or the gateway to a jail.

Gregor could see Jason Battlesea looking at him as he looked around the room.

“Are you waiting for me to ask?” Gregor said.

“Sort of,” Jason Battlesea admitted. “There’s another entrance, around the back. It goes to the lower level. The holding area is there, and about a dozen cells, including two isolation cells. If we have to lock up people, we have a place to put them.”

“That’s good to know,” Gregor said. “Do you ever have to lock up people?”

“Sometimes. We have a fair amount of crime here in the good weather. Burglary and car theft mostly. We’re not all that far from Bridgeport, which means we get a fair influx of the kind of people who tend to make a career of that kind of thing.”

Gregor considered this. “You don’t get anything local?”

“Sure we do,” Jason Battlesea said. “Lots and lots of drunk driving, especially in the spring. That’s the party season here for the high school and the kids home from college. We get a lot of marijuana, although we don’t tend to pursue those.”

“Why not?”

“Because the town doesn’t want us to,” Jason Battlesea said. “The parents here, they don’t just want their kids to go to college, they want them to go to Harvard. And the kids are not going to get there if they’ve been busted for weed. When we catch them with it, we don’t make a big deal out of it, and we don’t make it official.”

“What about other drugs?”

“Other drugs, we get more serious about,” Battlesea said. “On that one, the parents are adamant. They’re scared to death of heroin and cocaine. But even with that, we have to go slow sometimes.”

“Was this the first murder you’ve had?”

“The first in fifty years, yes,” Battlesea said. “The two people killed in the last bank robbery weren’t killed here. None of the robberies were even done here. But I looked it up. About fifty years ago, a woman named Grace Lewison shot her husband on the front lawn of their house on Sands Street at eight o’clock in the evening. She’d caught him sleeping with the maid.”

“Is Sands Street a good part of town?”

“There isn’t really a bad part of Alwych,” Battlesea said, “but it’s no Beach Drive. In case you’re wondering, it was the definition of an open-and-shut case. It was a nice summer day and the neighbors were all out on their lawns. They saw the guy run out of the house, they saw Grace run out after him shooting, and then when she got him she stood there and kept plugging him until the bullets ran out. Of course, this is Alwych, so she tried to plead temporary insanity.”

“Do you have anybody here who’s trained in homicide investigation?”

“Oh, we’ve got them trained,” Jason Battlesea said. “The town funds the hell out of it. It funds the hell out of all its public services. The public high school here will give you an education to out-Exeter Exeter. It’s got Latin and Ancient Greek as well as Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Chinese. The hospital offers cancer services to rival Yale–New Haven. So, yes, we’ve got people here who are trained in homicide investigations. They’ve been sent on training courses. They’ve been sent on refreshers. They’ve done all that kind of thing.”

“They’ve done everything but work on an actual homicide investigation,” Gregor said.

“I’ve got two detectives,” Battlesea said. “Both of them did liaison advisory stints with the Bridgeport police. That means they went down there and spent three months apiece working for the Bridgeport PD and going along on homicide cases with seasoned homicide cops.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Gregor said.

“No, it isn’t,” Battlesea agreed. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t help us here. Bridgeport has a real police department, if you don’t mind my putting it that way. They deal with a lot of crime, and a lot of violent crime, and they deal with it every single day. The problem is that it’s not this kind of violent crime. They have carjackings. They have home invasions. They have gang murders. People get stabbed in the street and robbed at gunpoint, and you couldn’t get me to work in a liquor store or a convenience store in Bridgeport on a bet. But it’s not this kind of thing. To tell you the truth, Mr. Demarkian, I didn’t think this kind of thing existed outside of
Murder, She Wrote.
”

“Are your two homicide detectives here now, by any chance?” he asked.

“They’re downstairs,” Jason Battlesea said. “We can take the elevator.”

Battlesea gave a little nod to the uniformed woman at the counter and led Gregor down the blank hall to an opening at the back, with elevator doors on both sides of it. The doors were wide enough to accommodate gurneys if they had to.

Battlesea pushed the call button, and as soon as one set of elevator doors opened, he ushered Gregor in and pushed another button.

The elevator bumped to a stop and Gregor followed Battlesea out and found himself confronted with what was, in a way, a more comforting atmosphere. It did look as if somebody had tracked dirt through here on and off, and there were people, many of them rumpled. Most of the rumpled ones were in the back, in open holding cells. They all looked tired.